Grazie to Duolingo for helping me reconnect to my childhood memories

“People who are smart and eager to learn?” I ask, hopefully. “People who crave constant validation,” she replies.

My friend knows how often I have tried and failed to learn Italian, a language I spoke best when I was 10 and spent a few weeks living in Tuscany.

That July, topping and tailing in bed with my cousins, I sometimes dreamed in it, as if our subconsciouses – so distinct by daylight – were merging in the dark. Soon after, both the language and the intimacy slipped from my grasp.

Sporadic attempts to make good on my loss – the fishing out of old textbooks, the dusting off of worn cassettes – all came to naught.

This time, though, I’m going to see it through because look, here I am, committing myself in print. And because the older members of my family – the custodians of its history – are growing frail, and time is running out to reconnect, to catch up on a lifetime of unhad conversations.

Whenever I log on, I am reconnecting with my past. Each fresh word Duolingo unveils carries a hamperful of memories. When it says “Andiamo alla spiaggia” (let’s go to the beach), I feel the hot sand burning the soles of my feet.

When it says “Vorrei un caffè con zucchero” (I would like a coffee with sugar), I picture men lined up at counters behind beaded curtains nursing tiny cups and morning pastries. When it says “La chiesa è vecchia” (the church is old), I hear a peal of bells across a dusty piazza.

Some words Duolingo has, as yet, withheld are childhood flotsam floating in my brain: zanzare (mosquitos, because they feasted on my skin); fiammiferi (matches because I was always sent to buy them); and fucili (rifles because they feature in an old song about the US landing at Anzio).

Duolingo

Italian fairy tales

Others come back to me from the Italian fairy tales I read long ago. I carry an armful of books up from the cellar. They are damp with broken spines and a fusty smell.

They include a hallucinogenic Le Avventure d’Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie and my lurid orange Arcobaleno copy of Pinocchio, the source of many a shivery thrill. On the cover the young rapscallion, his pert wooden nose upturned, falls in with the sleekit lame fox and blind cat. I thumb through searching for my favourites: parrucca (wig), falegname (carpenter) and “grillo parlante” (talking cricket). I say them out loud, taking pleasure in the texture of them in my mouth.

In the past, while pondering my family’s communication gap, I have sought out paintings of the Tower of Babel: the source of our dysfunction in that it marks the moment the world was broken up into a confusion of tongues.

It’s an insecure God, don’t you think, who would rob the people he created of the power to collaborate just for trying to reach Him in his Heaven? Imagine giving man ingenuity, then smiting him for using it.

The Catholic Church found a loophole, as it tends to do, conducting all its services in Latin, while Protestant clergy preached in the vernacular.

The most famous Tower of Babel painting, by artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder, was completed in 1563 when the conflict between the two Christian religions was at its height. It is a wondrous, intricate artwork, packed with telling details, but its focus is on the colossal nature of the project and man’s hubris, not the injustice of the punishment.

Spotting a group of prone male figures, I at first assumed they had hurled themselves to the ground at the pain of separation. But no, they are relaxing after a hard day’s work. Though the tower has started to crumble, the desolation that hangs over Milton’s Adam and Eve as they take their wandering steps out of Eden is nowhere to be found.

Milton's Adam and Eve

God’s work

An enduring desire to undo God’s work, and heal ethnic divisions, found expression in 19th-century attempts to create a universal language until English became more or less the lingua franca and it was game over for Esperanto.

But if we could go back in time and reverse Babel, what, then, would be lost? Wouldn’t language be reduced to the verbal equivalent of a McDonald’s: corporate, bland, stripped of all its idioms and idiosyncrasies?

Gone would be those lovely words that are not mere definitions, but reflections of the culture in which they were forged. German compound words like vergangenheitsbewältigung (the struggle of overcoming the past) with its industrial clanking; French words like tendresse with its sensuous purr; elusive, almost untranslatable words like the Welsh “hiraeth”, a longing, beyond homesickness, for something which can no longer be retrieved – all erased in the pursuit of sameness.

With them would go the art forms and artists with a particular language or dialect at their core. Would fado be fado if it was sung in anything other than Portuguese?

My mistake in previous attempts at fluency was, I suspect, to become too caught up in form and not enough in flow. This is true of music as well as language.

When my children were small and learning the piano, I learned alongside them for a while. My oldest friend had a piano in her childhood home.

On teenage sleepovers, I would wake up to the smell of percolating coffee and the soft plink of her brother playing, and think: this, this, is sophistication.

Now, as a fully-fledged adult, I was happy to pick out Au clair de la Lune note by faltering note because – assuredly – Au clair de la lune would lead to Gymnopédie No.1 would lead to the Rach 3.

But that’s not how it panned out. Halfway through grade one, their playing was already eclipsing mine.

Child hand on a shiny piano keys

Academic exercise

I COULD see where I was going wrong. I approached each piece as an academic exercise.

There was a constant soundtrack in my head running counter to the melody: “press G, now C; wait, is that a quaver or a semiquaver; should I be crescendoing, or diminuendoing” – whereas they instinctively surrendered to the sweep and swoon of it all.

Perhaps it’s the same with Italian. Perhaps, self-conscious over errors, I spent too long obsessing over conjugations and tenses instead of

giving myself up to the rhythms, the cadences, the minor falls, and the major lifts.

This time round, it still feels like a quest – a test of my mettle, a point to be proved – but, from now on, I plan to ditch the grammar books, lean into my lexiphilia and glory in the language of Dante and Petrarch.

Will it work? Will I finally reconnect? Who can say? But Bella Bella. Te lo dirò.